| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 2/18/2020 9:05:35 AM | | | | | | The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world
The AI moonshot was founded in the spirit of transparency. This is the inside story of how competitive pressure eroded that idealism.
Every year, OpenAI’s employees vote on when they believe artificial general intelligence, or AGI, will finally arrive. It’s mostly seen as a fun way to bond, and their estimates differ widely. But in a field that still debates whether human-like autonomous systems are even possible, half the lab bets it is likely to happen within 15 years.
In the four short years of its existence, OpenAI has become one of the leading AI research labs in the world. It has made a name for itself producing consistently headline-grabbing research, alongside other AI heavyweights like Alphabet’s DeepMind. It is also a darling in Silicon Valley, counting Elon Musk and legendary investor Sam Altman among its founders.
Read More - $MIT Technology Review |
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 2/18/2020 9:26:40 AM | | | | | | The Datacenter Has an Appetite for GPU Compute
It is not inconceivable, but probably also not very likely, that the datacenter business at GPU juggernaut Nvidia could at some point in the next one, two, or three years equal that of the core and foundational gaming sector. It is hard to tell based on current trends, and it all depends on how you extrapolate the two revenue streams from their current points and slopes and reconcile that against longer term data for the past six years.
The datacenter business at Nvidia was much smaller than the company’s OEM and IP businesses only a few years ago, and on par with its automotive segment until 2017, when GPU-accelerated HPC first really took off after a decade of heavy investment by the company and also when various kinds of machine learning had matured enough to for it to go into production at many of the hyperscalers and to be deployed as a compute engine on the large public clouds. Only four years ago, HPC represented about two-thirds of the accelerated compute sales for Nvidia’s datacenter products with the remainder largely dominated by early AI systems, mostly for machine learning training but also for some inference and also for experimentation with hybrid HPC-AI workloads. Now, as fiscal 2020 comes to a close in January, we infer from what Nvidia is saying about hyperscalers that AI probably represents well north of half of the datacenter revenue stream.
Read More – The Next Platform |
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 2/18/2020 9:31:33 AM | | | | | | Robotic process automation is a big market, but there will be only one big winner
The market for robotic process automation is one of the hottest in tech right now, rapidly gaining traction as larger enterprises look to speed up their business processes by automating mundane office tasks.
A lot of the buzz around RPA comes from the massive amounts of money being injected into the market. The two biggest players in RPA right now, Automation Anywhere Inc. and UiPath Inc., are both startups that have raised almost $1 billion between them, sharing a combined market value of nearly $14 billion. Meanwhile, the market generated revenue of around $1 billion in 2019, almost double a year ago.
Read More - siliconANGLE |
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 2/19/2020 10:09:51 AM | | | | | | Hackers can trick a Tesla into accelerating by 50 miles per hour
Hackers have manipulated multiple Tesla cars into speeding up by 50 miles per hour. The researchers fooled the car’s Mobileye EyeQ3 camera system by subtly altering a speed limit sign on the side of a road in a way that a person driving by would almost never notice.
This demonstration from the cybersecurity firm McAfee is the latest indication that adversarial machine learning can potentially wreck autonomous driving systems, presenting a security challenge to those hoping to commercialize the technology.
Read More - $MIT Technology Review |
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 2/19/2020 10:13:56 AM | | | | | | AI, the Transcription Economy, and the Future of Work
Gabriel is a professional transcriber, and for years he earned a middle-class living. In the early 2000s he'd make up to $40 an hour transcribing corporate earnings calls. He'd sit at his desk, “knock it out” for hours using custom keystrokes, and watch the money roll in. “I sent my son to private schools and university on transcribing,” he tells me. “It was a nice life.”
But in the past decade, the bottom fell out. As audio recordings went digital and broadband spread, clients could ship work to India and the Philippines. Meanwhile, buzzy Silicon Valley startups emerged—like Rev, a sort of Uber and 800-pound gorilla of the transcription world. It has moved the industry toward an on-demand gig model. Since Rev charged customers a flat rate of $1 per audio minute—less than half what transcription firms historically charged—Gabriel's pay sank even further. On top of it all, AI started nipping away at the industry, with machines now able to rapidly transcribe some audio as well as humans do.
Read More - $Wired |
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 2/19/2020 10:17:08 AM | | | | | | America’s monopoly problem, explained by your internet bill
In the summer of 2017, I decided it was time to put on my big-girl pants and try to talk to my internet provider about my bill. It had been gradually ticking up over the past several months without explanation — let alone better service — and I wanted to know what was up. When I called the company’s customer service line, the woman on the phone knew something I did not: I didn’t really have other service options available in my area. So, no, my bill would not be reduced.
More than two years later, I’m still mad about it. And yes, that could seem a little petty. But that monthly annoyance speaks to a broader trend that all Americans should be aware of — and angry about. Across industry after industry, sector after sector, power and market share have been consolidated into the hands of a handful of players.
Read More - Vox |
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 2/19/2020 10:22:47 AM | | | | | | Carbon Capture Wins Fans Among Oil Giants
Can new technology suck carbon dioxide, a prevalent greenhouse gas, out of the air—economically? More companies are betting that it can, as governments adopt ambitious carbon-emissions targets and investors grow increasingly concerned about the risks of climate change.
Carbon-capture techniques have existed for decades. But it’s incredibly expensive—not to mention energy intensive—to remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large enough scale to make a significant dent.
Now, Exxon Mobil Corp., Microsoft Corp. and others are focused on reducing the cost and the amount of energy required to capture carbon dioxide. Some companies are using giant fans to suck up air, then separating the carbon dioxide chemically. One venture plans to fill land in Arizona with dozens of accordionlike machines designed to expand as they absorb the gas.
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 2/19/2020 2:55:19 PM | | | | | | What I Learned From My Mother-in-Law’s Cable Bill—and Trying YouTube TV
It may be hard to believe, but Comcast still charges its cable TV subscribers a $9.95 monthly fee for high-definition TV—the 20-year-old technology that is standard in video-streaming services (and in TV sets). It’s one of a number of fees—also including a $12.60 fee for the right to watch free broadcast networks like CBS and ABC as well as an $8.75 fee for sports channels—that I discovered on my mother-in-law’s cable bill on a recent visit.
It reminded me of why the number of people cutting the cable cord is steadily growing—and it also made me wonder why more people aren’t trying streaming services like YouTube TV, Sling TV or Hulu Plus Live TV, which offer cheaper versions of classic cable delivered over the internet. I tried YouTube TV the weekend of the Oscars—it was stunningly easy to set up and a joy to use (and easy to cancel).
Read More - $ The Information |
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 2/21/2020 11:52:21 AM | | | | | | Cord-Cutting Accelerated in 2019, Raising Pressure on Cable Providers
The pace at which people are abandoning traditional pay-TV packages accelerated by more than 70% last year, as prices continued to rise and consumers gravitated to more affordable streaming options.
Large cable and satellite companies lost about 5.5 million traditional pay-TV customers last year, a roughly 8% decline, according to public filings. The numbers—which exclude smaller providers that have yet to report results for the entirety of 2019—are much larger than the loss of 3.2 million subscribers in 2018.
Traditional pay-TV customers are expensive for cable companies to keep, between installation and equipment costs and the ever-rising price of programming, which has led cable and satellite providers to raise their rates. Analysts predict more American households will cut the cord this year.
Read More - $ WSJ |
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| From: Paul H. Christiansen | 2/26/2020 2:53:21 PM | | | | | | Inside ‘Amazon Go Grocery’: Tech giant opens first full-sized store without cashiers or checkout lines
Two years after launching a chain of convenience stores without cashiers or checkout lines, Amazon is opening its first “Amazon Go Grocery” store in Seattle on Tuesday morning, enlarging the footprint for surveillance-style shopping and signaling a larger challenge to the broader world of brick-and-mortar retail.
GeekWire got a sneak peek at the store during a recent media preview, entering by scanning a smartphone app and strolling the aisles of the completely stocked store. The banks of cameras and sensors overhead track everything put into a shopping cart, with the help of artificial intelligence — rendering unnecessary the old-fashioned ritual of scanning and paying at a checkout stand. Items are charged to a shopper’s Amazon account shortly after they walk through the exit.
Read More - GeekWire |
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